4 posts categorized "Transportation"

June 12, 2008

Faced with runaway costs, the CTA and City Hall slammed the emergency brakes Wednesday on ambitious plans to build a "super station" in downtown's Block 37 to speed express trains to both Chicago's airports.

A combined $213 million has been spent on the project, yet there is not much more than a massive hole in the ground to show for it.

At least an additional $100 million would be needed to complete the subterranean station, the CTA estimated.

"The Block 37 curse continues," said Joseph Schwieterman, a transportation and urban planning professor at DePaul University who has for years doubted the viability of the transit project.

June 06, 2008

As mayor of Curitiba, Brazil during the 1970s, Jaime Lerner introduced double-articulated buses and tube-shaped pavilions where riders pre-paid before boarding. The result was a revolutionary transit system that moved high volumes of people, like a subway, but cost far less and was far less intrusive than boring tunnels through the ground. It was sustainable development before its time.

As the Tribune's Jon Hilkevitch reported in April, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley is seeking to emulate Lerner's success by introducing bus-only lanes on four major Chicago transporrtation corridors. Now Metrpolis magazine has an informative interview with Lerner. It's worth reading, if only because Chicago desperately needs to upgrade its transit system to have any chance of hosting the 2016 Summer Olympics.

April 23, 2008

Lower Wacker Drive ain't the Champs-Elysses. It's the ultilitarian underside of graceful Upper Wacker--the bottom of a viaduct that provides a convenient short-cut between the Eisenhower Expressway and the Mag Mile, not to mention a great spot for police car chase scenes in the movies. But Lower Wacker has long offered at least one compensation: Views through its classical arches of the Chicago River and the bottoms of skyscrapers on the river's north bank.

No more. At least not along all of Lower Wacker.

As drivers and riders of CTA express buses have undoubtedly noticed, construction workers (pictured earlier this month) have been filling in some of the arches, which were suggested in Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett's 1909 Plan of Chicago, with (ouch!) concrete blocks. The walls also are no feast for the eyes as you look southward from the north bank of the Chicago River.

It's happening in a three-block stretch between State and LaSalle Streets. And it's costing $145,000, according to Brian Steele, a spokesman for the Chicago Department of Transportation.

The walls, it turns out, are sound, debris and pollution barriers designed to address complaints of restaurant operators and retailers who set up shop on Wacker's lower-level walkway along the Chicago River last summer. "Some of the feedback we got was that the area was a little noisy and that there was exhaust from the vehicles down there," Steele said.

City officials apparently intended to construct the barriers all along. The walls were included in the city's plans to create a pedestrian-friendly riverwalk along the river's south bank and were approved by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency in the late 1990s, Steele said. The agency reviewed the plans in advance of the $200 million rebuilding of Wacker's east-west stretch between Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street. That project, which handsomely restored the double-deck, beaux-arts boulevard, was completed in 2002.

"Ultimately, when the riverwalk is built out, those spaces will be retail spaces and they will have back walls to them," Steele said. He acknowledged, however, that there is currently no funding for the riverwalk.

For now, at least, those ugly expanses of concrete tempt me to summon up the ghost of Ronald Reagan and proclaim: "Mr. Daley--Tear Those Walls Down!" Architecture is all about trade-offs. The trade-off here is that Lower Wacker's netherworld has just been made darker and meaner.

March 04, 2008

Design is alpha and omega, doors opening wide with promise and other doors slamming shut. Design shapes a spectrum of human experience, from the life-affirming to the spirit-crushing. The point is that--for better and for worse--there is always a hand, a mind, and an eye, behind what architects rather cloddishly call "the built environment." Two stories that just appeared in the Tribune make this clear and the unintended contrast they create is excruciating.

In his "Getting Around" column, transportation writer Jon Hilkevitch chronicles the car-happy landscape of suburbia, where some children live two blocks from their school but must take the bus to get there because there are no sidewalks. Why? Because somebody forgot to design them. This is the very auto-centric brand of urban planning (or is it non-planning?) that Miami architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who will be in Chicago later this month to receive the 2008 Richard H. Driehaus Prize, have so piercingly attacked.